Rangers Promote Yohander Mendez

The Rangers are promoting top left-handed pitching prospect Yohander Mendez as part of their first wave of September call-ups, reports MLB.com’s T.R. Sullivan. The 21-year-old is already on the 40-man roster and thus won’t require a corresponding move to accommodate his addition to the Major League roster.

Mendez received a $1.5MM signing bonus during the same international signing class that brought the Rangers Nomar Mazara and will be making his Major League debut the first time he gets into a game for Texas. While he began the season at Class-A Advanced, he’s sliced through minor league competition with relative ease, dominating his way to a big league audition. Mendez has a 2.19 ERA on the season as a whole, having worked to a 2.57 mark at High-A, 3.09 in Double-A and a lustrous 0.57 mark in 31 1/3 innings at the Triple-A level. In 111 minor league frames, Mendez has allowed just 72 hits, walked 41 and struck out 113 with a 46.3 percent ground-ball rate. Mendez has dominated right-handed hitters (.558 OPS) and left-handed hitters (.484 OPS) alike and could factor into the Texas rotation as soon as next season, even if he’s more of a bullpen/spot start consideration in 2016.

The Venezuelan southpaw saw his name land on a number of midseason top prospect lists, ranking 47th, 49th and 59th, respectively, on the lists of Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com and ESPN.com. All three of the linked reports praise Mendez’s three-pitch mix, with his changeup regarded as the best of his offerings. He sits 90-94 mph with a fastball and has at least an average breaking pitch as well. Keith Law calls him a “potential mid-rotation starter, if not better,” with the primary question at this point being how well Mendez can shoulder the workload of a full season’s worth of innings. Mendez tossed 78 1/3 innings between the minors and the Arizona Fall League last season, but that modest sum represented his career-high in innings pitched prior to this season’s count of 111. Listed at 6’5″ and 200 pounds he’s still fairly lanky in build, and considering his youth, there’s room for him to continue growing and fill out that frame, as noted in MLB.com’s report on him.

Thank god. Honestly hoping its Gallo because he’s just losing more and more value in the minors and he has really done anything to impress me personally. He comes off as the second coming of Russell Branyon.

Russell Branyan at least finished his career with an above average slash line (.814 OPS; 113 OPS+) and was worth about 12.0 fWAR over the course of his career. TBH, I don’t know if Gallo can even muster that. He just screams “bust”, and while I don’t agree with your hope that he’s the PTBNL in the Lucroy trade, I do hope the Rangers trade him for someone more valuable before an extended run at the MLB level craters his value.

Chris Davis and Adrian Gonzalez were once appraised as expendable by the Rangers, too. They’ve turned out okay.

Gallo reminds me a lot of Davis during his Texas years, raw power with good agility and no sense of the strike zone. Gallo’s still young. Give him time to develop a sense of the strike zone while the team has Major League talent around him.